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Sunday, February 17, 2013

Bouncer Round 6 #8

Title:
LILLY WASHINGTON'S PRESIDENTIAL ADVENTURE

Genre:
MG Contemporary/Adventure

Word
Count: 38,000

Query:

Not
many twelve-year-old girls have posters of the founding fathers hanging on
their bedroom walls. But Lilly Petunia Washington isn't your average twelve
year old. Lilly is an Abe Lincoln fangirl who's been able to recite the U.S.
Presidents since she was three. With parents named George and Martha
Washington, Lilly's status as history nerd extraordinaire is hardly a surprise.

With
the first day of middle school rapidly approaching, Lilly joins her best
friend, Madison James, on a trip to her family's historic farmhouse in the
country for one last summer hurrah. In a rush to find a lost iPad filled with
the latest boy band hits, she trips on a wooden floor plank. Examining the
cause of her fall, she finds a mysterious diary hidden underneath a loose
board. And not just any diary. A diary written over one hundred fifty years ago
by twelve-year-old Lizzy Johnson, who just happened to be born on the same day
Abe Lincoln was assassinated. Commence fangirl freak-out.

Convinced
the diary pinpoints the location of an unfound time capsule on the middle
school campus, Lilly attempts to persuade the meanest principal ever to dig it
up. But when Principal Adams refuses her requests, Lilly takes matters into her
own hands. Her wild quest to find the time capsule has the potential to solve a
hundred year old mystery concerning missing Civil War artifacts. And maybe even
link her own family to a certain Civil War-era President. That is, if she isn't
expelled first.

Not
very many people know Thomas Jefferson invented the coat hanger. Or that
Ulysses S. Grant got a twenty dollar speeding ticket for riding his horse too
fast down a busy Washington street. Lucky for me, my photographic memory and
talent for retaining all kinds of useless trivia is exactly what landed me a
spot in the Jeopardy kid's tournament of champions this summer.

I
didn't make it past the first round, though. I froze every stinking time the
red light on top of the camera flashed on. Stupid nerves.

My
eye wanders from the photograph of myself standing behind the Jeopardy podium
to the Mt. Rushmore calendar hanging next to my desk. It’s August 27, Lyndon B.
Johnson’s birthday. I draw a red circle around all of the presidential
birthdays with my Sharpie pen. There are five of them this month.

The only suggestion I have for the query is that you could leave a little of the detail out for finding the diary. It's probably enough to say that she finds it and get on with the cool stuff.

Love her voice in the first 250, she sounds like an awesome girl to get to know. It was a little jaring to me that the first pg was past tense (because she was remembering) and then it jumps to present tense. All correct, it's just that I noticed it. Probably because I'm not always a huge fan of present, so it stands out. The only suggestion I could make is to get something present tense first, then the memory/facts are logically in past tense w/o seeming out of place.

But this is really just a nit - I loved it and would want to read more.